Western Heroes, Girl Group Singers and Other Nice Things (Lifting the Best, Lamenting the Rest)

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Tag Archives: The Emotions

I skipped Paul Kantner, in part because I didn’t have much to add to what was already being said, in part because I was enduring my annual Australian Open hangover (just now clearing), in part because I kept hoping the Death Train would pull in for a rest.

Alas, it rolls on, and now it’s coming for the prophets.

By the time he stepped out in front of Earth, Wind and Fire, one of the three or four greatest funk bands (and twenty or so greatest rock and roll bands) ever, Maurice White was really just claiming a space he had helped create.

As a Memphis-born, Chicago-bound session drummer, he played on lots of seminal records in the sixties, none more so than Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me,” the 1965 smash that paved the way for Aretha Franklin’s breakthrough two years later (Dave Marsh once accurately dubbed it “the greatest non-Aretha Aretha ever,” and, as he also noted, the more remarkable for coming first). After that, White joined the Ramsey Lewis Trio and, across a number of albums, laid down the bottom for the funk-oriented jazz that EWF would one day turn into jazz-oriented funk.

Thereafter, along with leading one of rock’s essential bands, he also found time to be one of the era’s most formidable record men, kicking off the career of Deniece Williams and making perhaps his finest record with the previously fair-to-middling Emotions.

But it with his great band that he left his deepest mark. As a quadruple in-house dynamo (singer/songwriter/drummer/producer) he was probably matched in the seventies only by Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham–and even Buckingham shouldered a bit less of the load than White did.

Eventually, there were a slew of Grammys and the usual assortment of additional honors, plus 15 gold or platinum albums between 1973 and 1988–impressive for anyone, staggering for a funk band.

Above all that, there was an over-arching message, one that began in troubled times, lasted through the false “morning” of the eighties and still calls out to the future we threw away. Just in case we don’t manage to snatch it back, I hope the music will still be around to remind whoever’s up next of just what is possible.

Maurice White moved to the next plane yesterday after losing a decades-long battle with Parkinson’s Disease.

All he left behind, out of Africa and America, was a past worth reclaiming here and now and a future worth living for anywhere and any time.